That is a quotation from a letter to Tunghai University's faculty, staff and students appearing in today's Taipei Times house editorial. It is a remarkable passage in two ways. It is at once an implicit, and in my judgement, pretentious claim to collective guilt and also an attempt to soften the anticipated blow of public blame attribution to Tunghai University.

It is a pretentious claim to collective guilt because it pretendsto know why Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) ended up committing his monstrous crimes, namely, insufficient "love", and in particular, insufficient love from faculty, staff and students. Yet how could the Principal possibly know that? It only takes a momentary reflection on the intractable uncertainties and explanatory deficiencies in the field of psychology to be appraised of just how malproportioned a claim that is.

And then there is the question of collective guilt - how can any degree of blame be attributed to staff, students and faculty throughout the University given that many of them will not even have known Cheng or had the slightest bit of contact with him? Even amongst those that did have contact with him - his classmates and lecturers - how can they be blamed unless one presumes that they ought to have known what Cheng would eventually do? Should they have taken the alleged fact that Cheng tended to keep to himself as evidence that he might kill people? Students in a science department are in the process of being trained both not to presume, and to take pains to recognize the limits of their knowledge and the uncertainties involved in prediction. The contradiction may escape the Principal of Tunghai University and the editor of the Taipei Times, but there is no good reason why it should, as it is not by any means a subtle one.

Finally, the Principal's quoted assertions seem to carry an implicit view of love somewhat redolent of discussions of financial income, i.e. as a "resource" to be distributed by all faculty, staff and students toward one another equally, or if not equally then at least without discrimination. Hence even anti-social types are to receive such "love". This strikes me as particularly warped for the simple reason that to love something or someone presupposes attraction which is necessarily particular and thus discriminatory. Love is a value that must emerge naturally between freely interacting individuals.

It is typical of the editor of the Taipei Times to imply that mercy is owed to Cheng merely on account of him having been born in Taiwan - as if birthplace alone confers upon one a moral condition deserving of mercy.

On the question of why Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) committed the crimes he did on Wednesday, I will offer a different sort of conjecture to the usual pointless run through the "nature-nurture" valley of piled-up "maybes".

My general take on this is not specific to Taiwan. It seems to me that a culture in which values are coerced into prescribed forms instead of finding their natural resolution in the lives of individuals is eventually going to corrode individual morality. If the values toward which an individual acts are forcibly removed from him, or forcibly thrust upon him, then it seems reasonable to conjecture that his sense of control will be undermined to a corresponding extent. At the furthest reach of this friction lies the emergence of psychotic nihilists among those already susceptible to the abyss by psychological profile.

Yet the source of the problem is the insidious scope of institutionalized coercion in all its manifestations, from taxation, prohibition, confiscation and military conscription all the way through to compulsory education and on to the downstream behavioural and psychological habits of evasion, dissonance and doublethink this coercion engenders. It is perhaps ironic that the Principal of Tunghai University sees fit to encourage students, staff and faculty to "love" one another irrespective of their own valuations, as this partially reflects the kind of mechanism I am talking about: the crude attempt to manipulate values into prescribed forms and to thereby engineer the souls of a subject population.

Let us now take two observations: first, Cheng reportedly told police officers that "one of" his objectives was to receive the death penalty for his crime, so it seems clear that his crime was not only premeditated but was conceived in instrumental terms, i.e. as a means to the ostensible end of being condemned to State execution. Cheng was still a reasoning agent, even if the premises of his reasoning were invalid.

The second point is that his crime occurred outside of the city (Taichung) where he lived and studied and was committed against apparent strangers, people who could not have personally harmed him since neither he nor they knew each other. It therefore seems unlikely that he was motivated by revenge against specific people. Perhaps his "target" was the more diffuse notion of "society" in general? If so choosing the Taipei MRT would have made a certain amount of sense had he regarded Taipei as the society's "nerve centre" and the place most likely to raise his crime to the highest salience possible.

That quote would appear to indicate the depth at which whatever caused Cheng's problem occurred: since at least as far back as he was a pre-teen. What was his history, if it was not a history of abominable abuses?

5 comments:

Honestly the first half of this post strikes me as being unreasonably cynical. The fact that you can take fault with one person encouraging others to show concern for their friends and neighbours is mindboggling.

Also, keep in mind that Tunghai University is a Christian school founded by Methodist missionaries. I assume that the Principal, as well as a large portion of the student body, is Christian or has been influenced to a large degree by Christian teachings. ("Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." and all that.)

Since I'm commenting, I might as well offer my own theory of why these things happen. To commit a premeditated spree killing you have to be 1. willing to kill 2. wanting specifically to kill (as opposed to committing suicide) 3. willing to forfeit the rest of what remains of your life. Other factors will influence the exact outcome of events but these are the necessary conditions.

Lack of empathy and sufficient anger/frustration could cause 1 and 2 but what would lead to 3? Every spree-killer has different reasons for wanting to hurt others but the reason they end up choosing to kill random must be because they lack the means to cause destruction in any other way. If they had a large circle of friends, they could hurt them or rally them to hurt others. But in the absence of any ability to influence others, they have no choice but use the crudest of methods to lash out, a mass-killing. Therefore I believe the oft-mentioned asociality of these people is, in fact, key to understanding their actions, just not for the reason most people think. Most people fixate on the possible connection between asociality and (lack of) empathy and/or mental illness, whereas I think it's clear that the asociality is a symptom of the inability to influence others. It's that lack of power which is the problem.

"Therefore I believe the oft-mentioned asociality of these people is, in fact, key to understanding their actions... I think it's clear that the asociality is a symptom of the inability to influence others."

It's an interesting line of thought, but I would think an inability to influence others might be only one aspect of a loss of / lack of control. Crimes like this remind of Calhoun's 1968 study on mice and his notion of the "behavioural sink", which, though he regarded it as consequent to overpopulation, might actually be better explained as consequent to a conditioned loss of control. Psychotic behaviour may be consequent to a loss of control as the person "loses contact with reality".

I used the term concern because based on the context that's what I think he means. He asks for his audience "to walk a step closer to friends, look out for them, and to talk to them more often" To me, that's obvious "love thy neighbor" talk and is more or less independent of attraction as you suppose.

I would think an inability to influence others might be only one aspect of a loss of / lack of control. Crimes like this remind of Calhoun's 1968 study on mice and his notion of the "behavioural sink"

I definitely agree but I think this is more in answer to the question of why one would want to be evil, or how one became evil. Since that issue leads to the "nature-nurture" valley of piled-up "maybes", as you put it, I deliberately chose to avoid it. I'm more focused on why they would choose spree-killing as the way to express themselves (i.e. as the way to do evil).

If you want to satisfy a dark urge within, premeditated random spree-killing is basically the worst way to go because of how crude and unrefined it is. As in, you literally can not iterate and refine the process, because your first time is almost certainly your last. A serial killer can go through years of "practice" to get his twisted little world just right. A terrorist (leader) can have his followers blow themselves up, or at least take pains to cover his own tracks if he plants the bomb himself. And then make better bombs. A gangster can engage in petty crime on a semi-regular basis and arrange fights and maybe even a few contract killings if he so pleases. Maybe become a mob-boss someday. A psychopathic manager can [......] But a spree-killer has basically decided to throw everything in the wind. All that premeditation and for what? It's pure desperation and a clear indication that they basically had no cleverer nor more convenient way to be evil.

This ties into the issue of "loving thy neighbor" in a rather pathological way. My conjecture is that a twisted, unredeemable soul who is showered with love will find it preferential to hurt those very people who care for him as opposed to finding random people to kill. So ... extra love probably would stop a would-be spree-killer if only because it would offer him the leverage to harm others in a more controlled fashion.

You know on that first point... you might have the better of it: I had simply assumed Tunghai was just another one of Taiwan's endless list of universities, and hadn't known of it's Christian background. On the other hand, there's no reason why the principal could not have also intended his remarks to deflect (unwarranted) criticism of the university.

"My conjecture is that a twisted, unredeemable soul who is showered with love will find it preferential to hurt those very people who care for him as opposed to finding random people to kill."

That's an interesting idea, but the fact that Cheng did not kill his parents or his friends/acquaintances (whom, IIRC, he had apparently spoken to about his MRT plan) would seem to contradict it - unless it can be shown that they didn't care for him.